The Greater Wellington Regional Council’s (GWRC) public transport arm MetLink has announced a new train timetable.
Incorporating a 20 minute off-peak frequency, it will be implemented on the Hutt Valley and Kapiti lines from Sunday 15 July 2018 to coincide with the start of most of the new bus timetables.
For Kapiti residents the new timetable means that from around 8.00 am through to 3.00 pm on week days there will be a train to Wellington every 20 minutes.
There will be a corresponding increase in departure options in this off-peak period from Wellington back to Kapiti. Connections for Kapiti Line users with other lines at Wellington Railway Station have also improved.
Some other adjustments
There are some adjustments to peak period rail services including an additional commuter train from Waikanae to Wellington departing 6.48 am on weekdays.
This new service is not shown in the new Kapiti Line timetable now available to download from the Metlink website.
In the evenings on weekdays trains will be every 30 minutes from Wellington to Waikanae until 11.14 pm.
Full article on the Kapiti Independent News website
It’s a mixed blessing, of course — on one hand it’s good for commuters to the south, on the other hand it means more congestion at the Elizabeth Street level crossing. And unless there’s a new council elected next year that wants to improve infrastructure instead of dishing out millions of dollars a year to lawyers, Auckland-based consultants, on a huge surfeit of staff and to various social clubs, that situation is going to get increasingly worse.
Went into Welly during the day yesterday and very few people got on the train other than Porirua. I think they had the half hour service about right. Every 20 minutes seems wasteful like the empty buses during the day.
I’m really not sure about the slight of hand moving the 3:00pm train to 3:02. The regional council is being very coy with smoothing words but nothing clear as to whether gold card holders can use the 3:02 service. Nothing forthcoming from our representative.
Do we use our gold cards or is the councils kicking off a gold card claw-back? Anyone know?
I made this observation on neighbourly and the response was that the 3pm train should never have accepted gold card but train staff turned a blind eye! Between 9am and 3pm means excluding 9am and 3pm! Go figure! I believe metlink have been sneaky but I was voted down pretty much. Also with the new timetable the bus service that does the town route and now over the railway lines, does not coordinate with the early morning trains and will involve a wait of around 20 mins if you miss a connection. Also there are no buses coming through to connect to some of the train departure times at all! So much for encouraging use of public transport. The town centre and Waikanae North residents are now poorly serviced by buses but at least the beach community is happy!
There is an apparent 10-minute rule applied by GWRC which states: “A cardholder who boards a service within 10 minutes after the end of an off-peak period is to be treated as having boarded the service during an off-peak period”
In relation to trains leaving every 20 minutes apart from the 9am train which will continue to have a 6 car service all other off-peak services will have a two car service. Waikanae people should be happy as at least they are guaranteed a seat!